One Person, No Vote (YA edition): How Not All Voters Are Treated Equally

by Carol Anderson

To all of the voting rights warriors and activists who have fought and continue to fight to protect Democracy

The GOP’s overwhelmingly white constituency was becoming an ever smaller share of the voting public and the party wasn’t attracting legions of people of color because of its inability to craft policies that speak to an increasingly diverse nation. Rather than reform—change its ways, its outlook—the GOP decided to disenfranchise—to deprive Democrat-leaning people of their right to vote. One Person, No Vote is the story of these desperate, dastardly, and most undemocratic measures—and the history behind them.

After Reconstruction, some black Americans obtained positions in the government. But their power soon dwindled as white Americans worked against them.

The drive to disenfranchise black people, in particular, is best understood by going back to strides toward a real democracy. A government, as Abraham Lincoln said in his Gettysburg Address, “of the people, by the people, for the people.” This moment came after the Civil War, during Reconstruction. It brought, among other things, the 1865 Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution (slavery abolished), the 1868 Fourteenth Amendment (black citizenship cemented), and the 1870 Fifteenth Amendment (black men gained the national vote). But a more democratic America was anathema to a multitude of white people.

Reconstruction, which ended in 1877, saw scores of black men in the political arena and in government. Black artisans and entrepreneurs, laborers and lawyers, mechanics and ministers became postmasters, sheriffs, marshals, councilmen, commissioners, state legislators, secretaries of state. A handful were lieutenant governors. More than a dozen served in the US Congress.

“Many Texans refused to accept the fact that the Negro was ‘free and equal,’ and stopped at nothing to prevent him from enjoying civic and political rights.” —Maud Cuney Hare in her biography of her father, Norris Wright Cuney, a leading black Lone Star State activist, entrepreneur, and politician during Reconstruction

After Reconstruction, legions of white people did their utmost to ensure white rule—to keep black men from voting, to prevent black America from having any real political power. (While some black men did hold political office after Reconstruction, the numbers dwindled and dwindled.) Black voter suppression really ramped up in 1890 when the Magnolia State passed what became known as the Mississippi Plan: a dizzying array of poll taxes; literacy tests; understanding clauses (which officials used to justify registering some white illiterate people who they claimed understood the information read to them); newfangled voter registration rules; and “good character” clauses.

Virginia state senator Carter Glass, like many other white politicians, swooned at the thought of bringing the Mississippi Plan to his state. During Virginia’s 1901–2 state constitutional convention, Glass championed a plan that would “eliminate the darkey as a political factor in this state in less than five years.” “Will it not be done by fraud and discrimination?” asked a fellow delegate. “By fraud, no. By discrimination, yes,” replied Glass.

But the drive to wipe out the black vote would hurt poor and illiterate white people. And for many of those in power, that was just fine. For some it was the point.

The literacy test and understanding clause were tailor-made for societies that systematically refused to educate millions of their citizens and ensured that the bulk of the population remained functionally illiterate. By 1940, more than half of all black adults in Mississippi had fewer than five years of formal education. Almost 12 percent had no schooling whatsoever. The figures were worse in South Carolina, Louisiana, Georgia, and Alabama. During World War II, for example, Louisiana spent almost four times as much per capita on white elementary schoolchildren as on black ones. What’s more, for most of the twentieth century, many Jim Crow school systems did not have high schools for black teens. Deliberate underfunding of black schools was critical to the disenfranchising success of literacy tests.

ANALYZE THIS! A sample passage from Alabama’s constitution, which could be part of a literacy test that a would-be black voter might have to read and explain circa 1965: SECTION 260 The income arising from the sixteenth section trust fund, the surplus revenue fund, until it is called for by the United States government, and the funds enumerated in sections 257 and 258 of this Constitution, together with a special annual tax of thirty cents on each one hundred dollars of taxable property in this state, which the legislature shall levy, shall be applied to the support and maintenance of the public schools, and it shall be the duty of the legislature to increase the public school fund from time to time as the necessity therefor and the condition of the treasury and the resources of the state may justify; provided, that nothing herein contained shall be so construed as to authorize the legislature to levy in any one year a greater rate of state taxation for all purposes, including schools, than sixty-five cents on each one hundred dollars’ worth of taxable property; and provided further, that nothing herein contained shall prevent the legislature from first providing for the payment of the bonded indebtedness of the state and interest thereon out of all the revenue of the state.

It took the intervention of three white officials in the local United Mine Workers union, who got Governor Jim Folsom involved, before Leon Alexander was finally registered to vote. And even then the registrar tried to have the last laugh. He didn’t add Alexander’s name to the official list of eligible voters, so that although he was registered, he couldn’t cast a ballot. That required another intervention: one of those white allies telephoned and demanded that the registrar include Leon Alexander’s name on the list.

IN THEIR 1940 ARTICLE “DISENFRANCHISEMENT BY Means of the Poll Tax,” scholars Dan Nimmo and Clifton McCleskey explained that “the revival of the poll tax after the Civil War was intended not so much to disenfranchise the Negro as to place him again under the white man’s domination, since failure to pay the tax was made prima facie [proof positive] evidence of vagrancy.”

It was only years later, during the rise of Jim Crow, that the poll tax was deliberately used to choke off the black vote when many states required all age-eligible males to pay an annual fee in order to vote. (This would also apply to women after they gained the national vote in 1920 through the Nineteenth Amendment.)

But for many people the poll tax, ranging from $1 to $2, was no trifling thing. Not if you were poor, as many Southerners were. Many of them were sharecroppers. In his 1940 article “Suffrage in the South: The Poll Tax,” George C. Stoney noted that in Mississippi, the average farm family’s income was “less than $100 a year.” The poll tax would eat up almost 2 percent of the family’s income. If there were two would-be voters in that household, the poll tax would eat up nearly 4 percent. If three or four would-be voters . . . What’s more, for many states, the poll tax was cumulative. For every year a person was eligible to vote, a payment was due. So if, after twenty years of not voting or having been unable to vote, a person, say, in Alabama in 1944 was finally able to pay, he or she would need to cough up not $1.50 to do so but rather $30.

The poll tax came with yet another turnoff. In most states, it was due months before the election.

And say a black person could afford to pay the poll tax, there was the intimidation factor. You see, it was members of law enforcement who collected the poll tax. White sheriffs and sheriffs’ deputies were notorious in the black community for their brutality. A 1965 Commission on Civil Rights report told of a sheriff who “instructed his deputies to require all persons paying poll taxes for the first time to apply to him personally.” This was in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, where “most whites but few Negroes had registered to vote.”

Theodore Bilbo’s political operatives worked with election officials to handle the difficulty of keeping track of multiyear receipts. His all-white constituency’s “receipts are not only bought for them but are kept on file, issued on election day, re-collected and saved for the next year,” wrote George C. Stoney.

It was a total debasement and corruption of democracy, and it worked. During World War II, the overall voter turnout in seven poll tax states was an estimated 3 percent for the midterm election. The 1944 presidential election was only marginally better. The poll tax states had about an 18 percent turnout rate, as compared with the nearly 69 percent national average.

SO DESPISED WAS THE PARTY OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN, as the Republican Party was known—the party responsible for the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments—that from Reconstruction until 1968 the South was a one-party system. Only Democrats need apply.

With no federal interference and a one-party system, the white primary became a masterful way to “emasculate politically the entire body of Negro voters,” wrote Leo Alilunas in his 1940s article “The Rise of the ‘White Primary’ Movement as a Means of Barring the Negro from the Polls.” Come the general election, blacks who defied other methods of disenfranchisement, such as poll taxes and literacy tests, could vote if they wished—in what was by then an irrelevant and perfunctory election. Except black people fought back.

That was too explicit even for a US Supreme Court that had previously decided that the poll tax and the literacy test were constitutional in an 1898 decision in the case Williams v. Mississippi. After reviewing Texas’s white primary law, and seeing such an explicit violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause, the court was unanimous and unequivocal: “It seems to us hard to imagine a more direct and obvious infringement of the Fourteenth Amendment,” said Justice Oliver W. Holmes Jr., delivering the High Court’s decision in the case Nixon v. Herndon, a case decided in March 1927.

Again, blacks challenged Texas’s law, and again they prevailed—though this time by only a 5–4 decision in Nixon v. Condon, decided in May 1932. The statute, justices ruled, was unconstitutional because the so-called private Democratic Party received its authority directly from the state. Therefore, it was not a “private” actor at all but an agent of the State of Texas.

Once again, the state had effectively eliminated black Americans and Mexican Americans (this was, after all, Texas) from having any real voice in determining their representatives in government or the policies that would affect their lives. And so in 1935, blacks sued Texas for a third time. Only this time, the Supreme Court held that the Democratic primary was now a private matter. An organization had the right to choose the qualifications for membership, and that, according to the Supreme Court, is exactly what the Democratic Party did. Therefore, the State of Texas had not violated black people’s rights.

This landmark case from Louisiana, United States v. Classic (1941), erased much of the ambiguity about how far the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments could reach into the election process. “If a state law made the primary an integral part of the election machinery and if the primary did effectively control the choice of the elected official then Congress had the right and the duty to regulate and control such primaries,” explained historian Darlene Clark Hine of the High Court’s thinking.

In an 8–1 decision, the Supreme Court affirmed that sentiment when it ruled that the white primary, although supposedly a private affair, was central to the election process and, therefore, fell under the domain of federal law and the US Constitution. Marshall was overjoyed that the High Court had finally “looked behind the law and ferreted out the trickery.” But the shenanigans continued.

WHAT STATES COULD NOT ACCOMPLISH BY LAW, they were more than willing to achieve by violence. Attacks on black Americans in Colfax, Louisiana (1873), Wilmington, North Carolina (1898), and Ocoee, Florida (1920)—just to name a few—resulted in the loss of hundreds of lives simply because whites were enraged that black people had voted. As states encouraged or winked at the murders, as killers stepped over the bodies and gobbled up victims’ land and other property, black political power evaporated in a hail of gunfire and flames. This violence continued well into the twentieth century.

Talmadge’s followers carried out a major purge of the voting rolls, especially in the rural counties. They also engaged in acts of intimidation such as cross burnings. And Talmadge gave his blessing to waves of anti-black violence. A World War II veteran, Maceo Snipes, was one of the first to get caught in the tide of state-sponsored lynching. Black veterans were particular targets throughout the country because their sense of rights and racial justice had grown especially acute during the battles of World War II. Snipes had already put his life on the line for democracy. In 1946, he was willing to do it again. When the 1946 primary rolled around—the first since the US Supreme Court’s Smith v. Allwright decision—Maceo Snipes was not about to sit out the election in Taylor County, Georgia, where whites had already posted a sign on black churches that read: “The first Negro to vote will never vote again.” Undeterred, in July 1946, Maceo Snipes cast his ballot, the only black person in the county to do so. A few days later, white men showed up at Snipes’s house and demanded that he step outside. He did and was shot.

During the 1946 primary in Mississippi, Senator Theodore Bilbo riled up his “red-blooded Anglo-Saxon” followers with orders that “the best way to keep [black people] from voting . . . ​[was to] do it the night before the election.” In the run-up to the election, if any black person sought to organize to vote, “use the tar and feathers,” he advised, “and don’t forget the matches.”

Intimidation and violence did a heck of a job keeping black Americans from the polls. Over and over those who tried to register to vote were photographed by the police, were harassed and threatened by gun-toting, pickup-driving toughs. They received visits from sheriffs and endured arrests on trumped-up charges that led to jail time or exorbitant fines.

Denying the vote to millions of American citizens was so deeply rooted in the fabric of the nation, twisted into the mechanics of government, and embedded in the political strategy and thinking of powerful government officials that this clear affront to democracy was not going to change on its own. Fortunately, local resistance and global condemnation combined to take America to the brink of democracy.

STARTING IN 1947, THE UNITED STATES FOUND itself in a pitched battle for global leadership against the Soviet Union, aka the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), a federation of fifteen republics, with Moscow, the capital of the Russian republic, the center of power. Two superpowers. Two warring ideologies (state control of everything versus capitalism). Two economies (“command” or government controlled versus free market). Two nations with enough nuclear weapons to destroy the planet several times over. A head-on confrontation would result in Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).

There was also the propaganda war. The Soviet Union prided itself on meeting the material needs—housing, employment, health care—of its people. The people paid a steep price for those basics, including the loss of both freedom of speech and freedom of the press. The Soviet weakness played directly into the Americans’ strength: democracy. But wait a minute.

With Jim Crow on the throne, America’s vaunted democratic ideals became an Achilles’ heel. The Soviets broadcast this hypocrisy at every turn. Each lynching, each bombing of a black home or business, each miscarriage of justice became grist for the Soviet Union’s propaganda mill.

White resistance to the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision (1954), in which the US Supreme Court ruled segregated public schooling unconstitutional, was fiery, furious, fevered. It erupted most visibly in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, when nine black honor students sought to desegregate Central High School. The venom and violence these teenagers faced was seen around the world.

Little Rock also caught the attention of nations the United States wanted firmly allied with the West. Henry Cabot Lodge, US ambassador to the United Nations, wrote President Dwight Eisenhower that at the UN he could “see clearly the harm that [Little Rock is] doing. . . . ​More than two-thirds of the world is non-white and the reactions of [their] representatives is easy to see.”

The United States had zero credibility in the eyes of many around the world. Don’t be fooled, the Soviet Union warned: the US goal was to export Jim Crow, not democracy. “American racism and its savage practice of cruel persecution and abuse of minorities is . . . ​the true nature of the American ‘democracy’ which the United States is trying to foist on other countries and peoples.”

President Eisenhower’s solution was the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the first civil rights bill in eighty-odd years. This bill created the Commission on Civil Rights, upgraded the Department of Justice’s section on civil rights to a division, and authorized the US attorney general to sue those violating the voting rights of American citizens. The core of the 1957 Civil Rights Act gave the US Department of Justice (DOJ) the authority to sue jurisdictions (cities or towns) that blocked citizens from voting based on the color of their skin. Sounds good—but the lawsuit mechanism had a number of problems. First, DOJ lawsuits would be a reaction to voting rights violations, not a preventative. In other words, the “crime” had to occur before the DOJ stepped in. This meant that skewed election results, where a racist candidate assumed office because black citizens had been systematically disenfranchised, could affect years of policy and lawmaking while the long, drawn-out court process slowly unfolded.

If the registrar who was the named defendant in the lawsuit left office at any point during this process (a common ploy), then the case was thrown out.

On May 6, 1960, President Eisenhower signed another civil rights act designed to strengthen the 1957 one. Among other things, it removed the two-year limit of the Commission on Civil Rights and established penalties for people interfering with someone’s attempt to register to vote. But this was still not enough. The unrelenting pressure of the Civil Rights Movement, however, meant that America’s weak response to disenfranchisement would not go unchallenged. In Alabama’s Marion, Lowndes, and Dallas Counties, years of nonviolent protest led to a cinematic explosion on Sunday, March 7, 1965, on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.

Two days later came the bludgeoning in Selma of a white minister, James Reeb. He was targeted because he had the audacity to believe that black citizens had the right to vote. Reverend Reeb subsequently died of his injuries.

And like its sister act in 1964, the 1965 VRA was truly landmark. Rather than waiting for locales to violate voting rights and for people to make formal complaints, the VRA put the responsibility for obeying the Constitution onto state and local governments. The Voting Rights Act, as Michael Waldman so aptly put it in The Fight to Vote, “thrust the federal government into the role of supervising voting in large parts of the country to protect African Americans’ right to vote, a duty it had not assumed since Reconstruction.”

KEY COMPONENTS OF THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT OF 1965 SECTION 2 prohibited impediments created to keep people from voting because of their race or color. SECTION 3 opened the door to the appointment of federal examiners to oversee voter registration in places where voting rights were violated. SECTION 4 authorized the federal government to intervene in elections in states and political subdivisions (such as cities and counties) where discrimination was flagrant. Those states and political subdivisions would be determined based on a formula laid out in 4(b). It would apply to places where the US attorney general found that a literacy test, for example, had been in use on November 1, 1964, and where on November 1, 1964, less than 50 percent of eligible voters were registered or if in the presidential election of 1964 less than 50 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot. When the math was done, authorities determined that the places that needed to be watched were six states of the old Confederacy (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia) and 39 counties of another state: North Carolina (which has a total of 100 counties). The covered jurisdictions would be subject to section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Section 4 also had a bail-out provision: places could be released from federal scrutiny if, after five years, they proved that they had not engaged in any dirty tricks when it came to voting and voting registration. SECTION 5 stated that jurisd...

On March 7, 1966—the first anniversary of Bloody Sunday—in an 8–1 decision, the US Supreme Court, with Earl Warren as chief justice, reaffirmed both the constitutionality and the need for the VRA.

Tying the ability to read and write with the vote was no accident. After the 1954 Brown decision, Virginia led the effort to make the Supreme Court decision to end segregation in the public schools unenforceable. Lawmakers shut down school districts throughout the state, funneled tax dollars into all-white private academies for white children, and left black children high and dry. This went on for years. Then, after depriving black people of education, the state changed its laws so that those who were illiterate would not be able to vote.

“The Voting Rights Act was designed by Congress to banish the blight of racial discrimination in voting, which has infected the electoral process in parts of our country for nearly a century. The Act creates stringent new remedies for voting discrimination where it persists on a pervasive scale, and, in addition, the statute strengthens existing remedies for pockets of voting discrimination elsewhere in the country.” —Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1966 South Carolina v. Katzenbach decision

At-large voting is particularly insidious in areas where black Americans are a sizable part but not a majority of the population. It works like this: In the original confined districts, black Americans’ numbers were large enough to carry enormous electoral weight. Yet literacy tests, poll taxes, and Election Day terror had nullified that power and reduced black voter registration to the single digits. So, there was little possibility of a black candidate—or a white candidate attuned to the black community’s concerns—winning an election. After the Voting Rights Act, however, those districts could easily produce progressive elected officials. So Mississippi opted to dilute the black vote among a sea of whites by erasing the district boundaries and requiring candidates to run and succeed in a much wider geographical (and demographic) area. These supposedly race-neutral changes, one Mississippi legislator candidly admitted, would “preserve our way of doing business.”

When he delivered the majority opinion in the 7–2 decision in March 1969, Warren said that the changes the states had made were not beyond the scope of the VRA. Voting is not just the act itself, Warren chided. He reminded the recalcitrant states that the VRA maintained that voting includes “all action necessary to make a vote effective.” Then, to ensure that the range of activities subject to the VRA was clear, he insisted that the Voting Rights Act “was aimed at the subtle, as well as the obvious, state regulations which have the effect of denying citizens their right to vote because of race.”

ARGUMENT #3: The VRA picked on the South. In 1970, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, one of the most powerful members of Congress, insisted that the VRA was “nothing more than a device created to inflict political punishment upon one section of the country.” Such thinking totally ignored decades of Election Day terror, literacy tests, poll taxes, and white primaries. It failed to explain the fact that as late as World War II, fewer than 1 percent of age-eligible blacks were registered to vote in South Carolina. It also ignored stats like this: when Thurmond uttered those infamous words in 1970, only “28 percent of blacks were registered in Thurmond’s home of Edgefield County, compared with 96 percent of whites,” Ari Berman pointed out in his book Give Us the Ballot.

Julia Wilder, a black woman who was president of the Pickens County Voters League and an officer of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), had been hard at work to make the Voting Rights Act viable in rural Alabama. By the late 1970s, no black American had ever been elected to county office in Pickens, a county that was 42 percent black. Joining Wilder, then in her sixties, was Maggie Bozeman, a black woman and president of the local NAACP. For the 1978 county elections, Wilder and Bozeman collected absentee ballots from more than three dozen elderly black people, had those forms certified as valid by a notary, then sent them to the Board of Elections. Enter Sophie Spann.